March 30, 2004

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

I have to say that I don't agree with, or perhaps understand, many aspects and details of the men's movement. Face to face with some of the practitioners, I have this vague idea I am being sold something I really don't need or want to buy. I tried mightily to read and enjoy Iron John, but simply couldn't get all the way through it. I guess on some level I am not a mythopoetic kind of guy.

But then this I found a companion to Iron John, this great anthology of poetry, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, and I have been reading it since. This was 10 years ago. I am exaggerating of course, but only a little. This book is a constant in my reading habits. I refer to it again and again, and have recommended it (and purchased it) for more friends than any other book I know.

Simply, this is a wonderful anthology of poetry, organized thematically, for men. Many of the individual poems are brilliant, and the overall organization is intelligent and, at times, profound. As I have grappled with marriage, fatherhood, aging parents--all the trappings of midlife--this book has been a constant source of wisdom and comfort for me. Do a kind thing for yourself or for a thoughtful man in your life and buy this book.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:34 PM

March 29, 2004

Updated "eForms Resources" Again

I continue to update the list of resources related to electronic forms and Xforms that I started on March 20. This is the last time I will specifically mention an update to it here, unless it is a major change. I plan to keep using Onfolio to maintain the database of resources and regenerate the report and resulting Web pages.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:21 PM

March 27, 2004

The Redeye, and Giving LA One More Chance

As luck would have it, my first trip to LA combined two of my least favorite things about business travel—(1) being too busy with work to have any fun and (2) flying the redeye.
I didn't know flying the redeye was one of my least favorite things because I had never done it before. Several things told me to never try it:

  1. I need my eight hours of sleep or I get really whiny

  2. I am not the type to sleep on any moving object, let alone a plane. All of my energy and concentration are required to keep the plane in the air, so I better not fall asleep on the job

  3. I have always preferred flying first thing in the morning, believing that a perky pilot is a safe pilot

However, I did manage to sleep, in a long series of catnaps over about a four-hour period. I actually think I would have slept more, but it is essentially impossible for someone of my height (6'2") to get comfortable in a coach seat. As I drifted in and out of sleep, I kept wondering if they would let me lie down in the aisle.

As I alluded to earlier, my trip to LA was all highway and hotel, with brief sidetrips to—I kid you not—Kinko's and Universal Studios. This is not my kind of trip. First of all, I like to walk around (and go for runs) to experience a new place. I also like to get out of the hotels and go to businesses where locals might happen to gather—a diner or cafeteria for breakfast, maybe a pub for dinner.
So, at first glance, LA was a washout, and the redeye could have been the final punctuation. But I am more than ready to go back if I have to, and can even say that I am looking forward to it. Why, pray tell? Well, from what I can tell of Southern Californians, I like them. Granted, almost every local I spoke with was waiting on me—at the hotel, at Kinko's, at Universal Studios—but even in these engagements I sensed a consistent, kind regard that I don't experience in Boston. Of course, I could be fooling myself, but it is probably worth going going back and finding out.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:30 PM

LA Presentations: XML Tutorial and eForms Session

We wrapped up the Gilbane conference yesterday in LA. It seemed to go really well overall, though I look forward to seeing specific feedback from the attendees.

The following are PDFs of the slides from my sessions, including the XML tutorial and the double session on eForms.

For a listing of other presentations from the conference, please click here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:11 PM | Comments (1)

March 26, 2004

Los Angeles

I really can't comment fairly about Los Angeles. Since I have been here, I have seen the hotel, Kinko's. and the freeway. Well tonight, in fact, I saw more freeway, and then Universal Studios. I sort of felt like Kruschev visiting Disneyland. I know there is more to Los Angeles than I am seeing, but I am just too darn busy.

It is probably fair to say, though, that Los Angeles is a driving city, in the same way that Boston is a walking city and NYC is best navigated by taxi cabs. The drive from LAX to the hotel in downtown LA was surreal though. I am pretty certain the driver went north, south, east, and west—perhaps on the same way highway—in the course of taking me to the hotel. I am also pretty sure it took as long to get from the airport to the hotel—longer even—than it did to fly from Boston to LA.

Tomorrow is another busy day, so I probably won't get to see much more of the city. I had been hoping to get out to Venice Beach, but I would probably need to do that tomorrow night on my way to the airport. My only thrills so far have been seeing familiar place names (Mulholland Drive, Hollywood Boulevard, the Hollywood Bowl) but, alas, only from the freeway. Surely, there is more to LA than this?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:47 AM

Adobe Designer Beta Program

Chuck Myers from Adobe did a great job at today's Gilbane conference event on eForms. One of the things he discussed is the general availability of the Beta version of the Adobe Designer 6.0 forms creation software.

Please go here to get more information.

To quote briefly from the Adobe Web site:

Adobe Designer 6.0 software from Adobe enables users to extend the power of XML to create Portable Document Format (PDF) and HTML forms that effectively capture data and easily integrate it into enterprise systems. This capability enables a high return on investment because it uses embedded intelligence to validate data at the source of capture, eliminating the time and effort -- and costly mistakes -- associated with rekeying. And because PDF files can be filled in and submitted electronically, they speed document transactions and give users instant access to forms from anywhere on nearly any device.

I will be posting copies of the various presentations here shortly.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:32 AM

March 22, 2004

Updated "eForms Resources" Published

I updated the list of resources related to electronic forms and Xforms that I started a few days ago. My thanks to Spike Washburn of Onfolio who redid my report template. As Spike wrote:

I'm glad to see you were able to make it fit the branding of your company. I noticed the way you embedded the logo.gif at the top of your report and thought you might like to see a sample of how to create a customized report theme for your company. This will make all of your reports look consistent, and prevents the logo image from being a editable piece of content.

I should mention that it was very easy to update my links, produce a new report, and then publish the new report to the Web site.

As I said before, let me know what you think. It includes:

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:23 PM

March 21, 2004

Mayhem

The last coherent thought I had, before all hell brook loose, was that I would have done anything to have her spend more time in the store that day. It was Sunday, the slowest day of the week, and customers were coming and going in a slow trickle. I liked this job best on weekdays. It was a large, modern, well-stocked pharmacy at the base of the Prudential tower, Boston's second biggest building at 52 stories high. When those elevators opened on a weekday morning or afternoon, we would have a flood of people.

I was 19, home for summer break from college; my favorite part of the job was the women. It is not an exaggeration to say that there were hundreds of pretty women who came into the store every day. Even if I relied on the businesses inside the tower alone, I would have been a happy young man. But the icing on the cake, so to speak, was the secretarial school that occupied the three lowest floors of the tower. I was guaranteed a steady stream of young women pretty much every hour of the day.

But this was a Sunday, and Sunday meant a slow day. I often was given things like inventory and pricing to do, but on this day I was tethered to the cash register. This meant an especially slow day.

Sometime in the late afternoon, she came in the store. Even at first glance, I knew she was beautiful. It was a blazingly hot summer day, and she was wearing the sort of pretty girl summer outfit that was in style in those days, which I can only describe as a shorts suit--very short shorts and a matching top with a low neckline. Coming out of the heat, the suit clung to her body in such a way that I knew I would only be able to look at her for a split second at a time without embarrassing both of us.

She picked up one of our little shopping baskets—this was a good sign. When she started her way up and down our toiletries aisle, I took her for a tourist staying at one of the local hotels or perhaps a rich girl from one of the better apartment buildings nearby. The tourist idea was especially intriguing. I had spent lots of time helping tourists that summer—with directions, restaurant recommendations, and purchases. Earlier that same week, I had sold about 200 toothbrushes to a visiting dentist from Brazil. I was beginning to entertain the idea of a long conversation when she came around one of the displays and I saw her head to toe for the first time. I can only remember that I was so overwhelmed by how sexy she was that I could only formulate exactly that thought—I would do almost anything to have her end up spending a long time in the store that day.

My reverie was immediately broken, though. When you spend a lot of time in the city, you develop something akin to spider sense, and the man entering the store just behind my beautiful customer was clearly trouble. He was short and thick, and what was left of the blonde hair on his head was long, matted, and pointing in every direction. And he was wired—every part of his body was in motion, and no two things were going in the same direction. Somehow, though, he made straight for me, and handed me a prescription. I didn't have to even look at it to know it was bogus.

Junkies are usually pretty resourceful. Somehow they get these prescriptions—sometimes from real doctors that they have conned into believing they have a problem, sometimes from doctors that are knowingly enabling them. But they also steal other people's valid prescriptions, or get a relative or friend to fake a complaint to get a real prescription. There is also outright forgery—the junkie's desired fix written out on a prescription blank in the same jargon and format a real doctor would use.

Junkies who forge prescriptions are also usually, for lack of a better word, reasonable. They know what normal doses usually are, so, if they were forging a prescription, they would write it for an amount that made sense. For instance, if their drug of choice were cough syrup with codeine, they would write a prescription for four ounces or eight ounces; 16 ounces would be pushing it, and no one writes for more than 16 ounces unless they are medicating a horse. Similar with pain killers. First of all, painkillers are only prescribed for a short amount of time—typically less than a week. Thus, a prescription for Tylenol with codeine might call for 3 pills a day for 5 days, and that would be from a liberal doctor. So a doctor doesn't write a painkiller prescription asking for 40 pills to be consumed in 5 days, unless he is Dr. Kevorkian.

The one drug that afforded some latitude for junkies were sedatives like Quaalude. A sedative could be reasonably prescribed for a month at a time, typically for one pill a day, but sometimes for two. A prescription then, for 30 Quaalude is reasonable, and 60 would be pushing it. Mr. Jumpy, though, had just handed me a prescription for 100 Quaalude. Not only was it too many, but it wasn't even divisible by 30. Plus, while he had been savvy enough to at least write it in ink, his handwriting was heavy enough to give the impression it was written in black crayon.

At least I had a read on the situation now. He wasn't a stickup guy; he was a junkie. This would play out the way every scene with a junkie would play out. I would walk the prescription back to our pharmacist, who would busy himself for a few moments and then, very soberly, come around from behind his big counter in back, hand the prescription to the junkie, and say, "I'm sorry, but we're out of stock." The junkie would know he was "made"—that the pharmacist had him figured out, and would take the prescription back and leave. All would return to normal.

Before I tell what happened next, I should explain the layout of the store a bit, and where all the principal players were standing as the scene unfolded. Imagine two long counters at a right angle to each other. The pharmacist's counter is at the back of the store, raised about two feet above the floor of the store. My counter ran along one wall of the store, running from the pharmacist's counter out to the front door of the store, probably about 30 feet away. Mr. Jumpy handed me the prescription at the far cash register, about 20 feet away from the pharmacist's counter. I had to take it from him, say something polite, and walk the 20 feet back to the pharmacist, Harry, who happened to be on duty that day. I then returned to my register, and Mr. Jumpy started drifting down toward Harry. This left me face to face with the stunning Elena, whose name I would learn later when we were cleaning up.

It has been 27 years since this event happened, and I can still see the next moments in my mind as clearly as if it were yesterday. What I still don't understand is why Harry said what came out of his mouth next.

I am sure Harry thought it was the right thing to do. Indeed, the normal approach of saying the drug was "out of stock" was merely a polite way of passing off the problem to someone else. Maybe Harry was finally sick of not doing the right thing. Maybe—and I think this is probably a better guess—he was offended by Mr. Jumpy's stupidity and heavy-handedness. Whatever motivated him though, Harry did the most astonishing thing. Looking down at Mr. Jumpy from behind his counter, a safe several feet away and above the fray, Harry picked up the phone, and with the phone in one hand and the bogus prescription in the other said, "This is a fake prescription, and I am calling the police."

Do you know the expression, "steam came out of his ears"? Well, that doesn't happen, or at least it didn't happen in Mr. Jumpy's case. Instead, he hopped in place, screamed "You fucker!" and lunged at the cast iron cash register in front of him and at the far end of my counter. Now I had tried to move the cash registers on occasion; you can hardly budge them. But Mr. Jumpy shoved that register clean off the counter and into the glass display case behind it. He then began charging down the counter toward me, lunging and clearing everything off the counter as he did—a case of watches, several feet of cascading shelves holding pills and sundries, the entire 12 feet of candy display. Now he was to me, and the second cast iron cash register was rocketing at my groin. I somehow avoided it, diving sideways over and onto the tumbling candy. In my lunge, I briefly caught Elena's eye and had the silly thought that I hoped I looked pretty cool jumping.

Before I could get back to my feet, Mr. Jumpy had cleared the rest of the counter and made it to the door. Thank God, I thought, he is fleeing. But then I saw Harry dash across the store and reach Mr. Jumpy, grabbing him by the scruff just as he reached the door. Now I always point out that I am not much of a fighter. At that age, I was 6'2 and 155 pounds. I wasn't scaring anyone. But next to Harry, I looked like an Adonis. He was several inches taller and somehow about 20 pounds lighter than me. I quickly sized Mr. Jumpy at about 5'6" and 225 pounds. I watched as Mr. Jumpy, stumbling to get loose of Harry's grip, wound up with a punch from the floor, aiming at Harry's head several feet away. It was such a slow arcing punch, and it had to cover such a distance, that I had time to visualize it reaching Harry and tearing his head clean off his shoulders. Thank God again, this time Harry had the presence of mind to duck, the punch missed, Mr. Jumpy pulled away, and bolted from the store.

You can imagine the obvious parts of the aftermath. Police were called, and came. Statements were made, descriptions given. The offending prescription was offered as evidence. The police called an ambulance over Harry's objections and the EMTs checked him out. He was fine. A small crowd gathered and gawked for a while. Finally, the police and EMTs left, and the crowd moved on. Harry wearily directed me to start straightening up, and went to call some other clerks to see if they could come in and help out. I was just sizing up the 30 feet of mayhem when I realized that Elena was standing at my elbow, still holding the basket of things she intended to buy.

"Oh, gosh, yeah," I said, snapping back into my role. "You probably want to pay for those things, don't you?"

I almost couldn't complete my thought before we were both giggling. Even if I could have gotten to the cash registers, they were covered in glass and debris. (We would later find out one was irreparably broken, prompting the owner to buy all new equipment.) Glancing at her basket, I could see none of it was essential. I could only shrug my shoulders and keep giggling nervously, not sure how to act again in front of this stunning young woman.

Even at 19, I knew how wonderful and therapeutic hugs are. How even in the times of the greatest sadness and stress, a long, firm hug can be the most reassuring and giving thing. So when Elena put down her basket and reached up to all her height and enveloped me in a long hug, my 19 year old body fought through the myriad sensations—the wonderful scent of her lotion and shampoo, the startling fullness of her breasts, the warmth of the small of her back—and resolved to hold her as fiercely as she held me.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:24 PM

March 20, 2004

"Eforms Resources" Created with Onfolio

I decided to try out Onfolio by creating a list of resources related to electronic forms and Xforms. Let me know what you think. It includes:

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:42 PM | Comments (1)

Onfolio

Allaire founders J. J. Allaire and Adam Berrey emerged this week with a new company and a new product, Onfolio. The premise of Onfolio is directly on-target—one of the primary uses of the Web is research—and the new product is designed to help users collect, catalog, organize, and share the information they find on the Web. My initial take on the product is that it adds a lot of value to this important process.

More than a shortcuts organizer, Onfolio allows you to collect and organize Web pages, snippets of Web pages, documents—in short, anything you can cut and paste or save in whole, such as PDFs and office documents. What is potentially much more valuable here is that you can usefully share and publish the results. In addition to the obvious features such as "share this link" or "share this collection of links," Onfolio allows you to publish your results as email, Web pages, and even RSS feeds.

The initial release of the product is closely tied to Microsoft. The installation works only on Windows XP, 2000, and 2003, and works best with Internet Explorer. However, it looks as if there is enough publishing flexibility to allow users to create generically useful HTML and RSS.

I will be trying it over the next few weeks and will report on it. I am going to start by collecting and organizing some current research I am doing on eForms.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:58 PM

Can't Buy a Thrill

The first time I rode Amtrak between Boston and New York City I was 14 years old. The trip back to Boston took something like 9 hours instead of the scheduled 5 1/2. My memory tells me this wasn't an untypical delay in those days. Everyone was quite resigned to it, and a small knot of us took over the club car and started drinking.

At 14, I was already a pretty experienced drinker (more on that elsewhere). I was also tall, over 6 feet already, and for some reason no one ever asked me for an ID. (Things were looser then, too; now, at 44, I can't buy a beer from people half my age without showing an ID.) As a result, I was able to settle in one of the booths and kill a few hours and a few beers.

Time on a slow train drags in its own way. They closed the club car after Providence, and we seemed to slow to a walking pace for the stretch from Providence to the outskirts of Boston. The beer was wearing off, and I must have peed about 12 times. Finally, not able to stand it any more, I gathered my suitcase and book and decided to wait between cars. Someone had beaten me to it, though. Waiting for me was a hippy, probably twice my age, all hair and camouflage jacket and massive backpack. This was 1973. My quick read was that he was a Vietnam vet, long back from the war, and trecking around the country. Boston was neither his point of departure or his final destination, and he exuded more cynicism and fatigue than I knew even existed in the world.

He sized me up well, though. Maybe it was my long hair and jeans. Maybe it was the beer on my breath. Maybe it was the book under my arm, which was, ironically, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. But he set his gaze on me, shook his head, and with a sad, wise smile said, "Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby...."

His cadence and the way he paused at the end made it clear he was waiting for the next line. It was Dylan, and I had to deliver. And I did, offering "Can't buy a thrill" with what I hoped was an appreciative and knowing nod and half smile.

Satisfied, he dropped his gaze and shifted his weight to adjust to the slow rocking of the train. It would take another 15 minutes before the train finally hissed to a stop at South Station. It was a hot August evening, and the air hung heavy in the train yards. Perched between the train cars, the haze and the diesel fumes enveloping us, I fought a thousand urges to say something else, to pierce our silence in the growing dusk.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:07 AM

March 17, 2004

What Works

Reviewing some recent postings, I realized I have been complaining a lot about email, so I want to balance the negative by spending some time thinking about and writing about what works well in the Internet. I am a suspicious sort (being a lifelong Red Sox fan will do that to you), so I fear that I may be jinxing myself. But I will try anyway.

So what does work? My first thought is that many of the large e-commerce sites seem to not only work well but seem to be improving over time. Now, I am sure people run into problems, but I wonder how the problem rate in major e-commerce sites compares with, for example, catalog ordering by phone. Has this been tabulated?

I mention this because of some recent experiences with eBay. I am an infrequent seller and buyer on eBay. As a seller, though, I am attuned to ease of use. Over the past year, eBay has added a number of features, most notably better integration with PayPal. You still have to log in separately to PayPal for many functions (a drag, but perhaps a necessary evil for security reasons), but the eBay selling interface provides a much more unified view of status than it formerly did. It feels more like an application, instead of a bunch of loosely aggregated links.

Now I can check payment status and shipping status on items much more easily. One newer feature caught my eye. I can now print postage and shipping labels directly from my paypal account. The fee is charged automatically, the labels printed, and the recipient notified via email that the package is being shipped. The email notification can include the tracking information for the package. This newer feature eliminates many manual steps for me as a small seller.

The one drawback is fees. The profit from small sales, especially, can be eaten up by the combined fees of eBay and PayPal. The goal should be an e-commerce infrastructure that makes profitable even the smallest sales (think a total sale of 10 cents for an archived news article, with the total fees being less than a penny).

I can see small publishers taking advantage of this kind of infrastructure over time. Such an infrastructure should widen the kinds of products publishers can
efficiently produce and profitably distribute.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:27 PM

DRM Conference

My colleague Bill Rosenblatt of DRMWatch has launched a new conference focused on DRM. This will be held April 12-14 in New York City.

I will be moderating one session, DRM Markets II: E-Publishing, which is described as follows in the conference literature:

DRM has taken hold in a number of niche markets in e-publishing, including e-newspapers, e-zines, and e-books in both trade titles and textbooks. Publishers are de-emphasizing free web content and turning to premium online products. They need to transition their readership to paid products by providing value while also protecting copyright. Learn how top publishers are taking advantage of DRM technologies in their paid content distribution models and what markets they are serving with new DRM-enabled offerings.

You can view all of the conference details and register here.

The panel will include Sanford Bingham, President of FileOpen Systems,
Michele Chaboudy, Chief Marketing Officer of NEWSSTAND, and Jonathan Stowe, Director, New Initiatives, John Wiley & Sons .

In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, let me mention that the DRM book written by Bill, with help from me and Stephen Mooney, is still the best one-stop resource for understanding DRM.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:56 AM

March 16, 2004

On Organization

I am not the most organized person.

Let me try that again. I am not an organized person. I go through the same silly routine every morning of trying--and failing--to find my eyeglasses, cell phone, and shoes. I like to think I am doing well because I have no trouble at all finding my pants, shirt, underwear, socks, keys, and wallet; when I was younger, I had the toughest time with wallets, keys, and combs. I finally gave up using a comb and only organize my hair with my fingers now.

(Which reminds me. Thank God for baseball caps and that no one seems to mind if you wear them everywhere. So on bad hair days, I don't have to feel self-conscious about wearing a baseball hat to almost anywhere except for church. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of losing baseball hats...)

I used to really fret about my lack of organization--that I wouldn't realize my full potential because I lost eight minutes every morning searching for my shoes. Then I spent some time celebrating my quirkiness, but I was the only one who was amused by it. I have reached a new stage now--anger. I am totally pissed off about this pretty much every day. This phase won't last long, though; as the old saying goes, I am risking my happy home. Apparently, the only thing more frustrating than not being able to find your shoes every morning is being married to someone who storms around the house for eight minutes every morning looking for his shoes and cursing the American shoe industry.

I had no idea that lack of organization was a problem until I was with my wife. After all, I had grown up with a mother who lost her keys every morning, so my problem seemed just part of the routine, right up there with making coffee and leaving the milk in the oven after I was done with breakfast. When we moved in together, my wife began to point out my quirks. I think she initially found it charming that I would write notes to myself and leave them in a trail between the bedroom and the front door. How else does someone remember to get anything done? Unfortunately, moving in with her also meant moving in with her dog and four cats. Needless to say, the small pieces of paper were not where I left them, and all hell broke lose. Appointments were missed, cars were left at the shop or never brought there to begin with, and bills were left unpaid.

Fortunately for me, I developed a new scheme for remembering things. I now carry all those pieces of paper around with me. I jot things down on whatever is handy, and then carry the paper in my pocket. This would be pretty much fool-proof except I never actually look at the pieces of paper.

I am fibbing, of course. I look at them about once every two months. The results can be kind of startling. Lost among the grocery lists and gasoline receipts will be a scribbled note about a book to read, a train or plane ticket stub, business cards, folded notes from meetings, orders of service from church. Tonight was one of the nights I actually got around to looking at these notes, and found many of these things, plus a neatly printed note:

o'maley

atlantic st

617 846 0568

4-8 Tueday
9 Wednesday at Funeral Home
10 Wednesday Mass

Words are amazing things. This little bit of geography and scheduling, so precise and yet so sparse, set me in motion for the week of my mother's funeral. A plane ticket--often printed now on fax-like paper--can hurl you miles in the air and thousands of miles across the country.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:44 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2004

Eye Believe Productions

I don't talk too much about my company and capabilities in the context of the blog. However, one of the companies I work with is moving back to the Boston area after a couple of years in New York and San Francisco. Eye Believe Productions provides an array of multimedia services, including Web design, application development, and multimedia production. Past clients range from Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Feel free to contact me or visit their Web site for more information and a portfolio of recent work.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:14 PM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2004

Reading Ulysses

I am beginning my third serious attempt to read James Joyce's Ulysses.

The first time I was in college, and I was simply overmatched. I was pretty fresh from reading Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, and it was just too much of a project. I had been so moved by Dubliners that I continued to reread it perhaps a dozen or more times in my 20s. When I taught, I often included "Araby," "The Dead," or "A Painful Case." I don't think I ever managed to make anyone appreciate Joyce nearly as much as I did.

The second time I tried reading Ulysses I was in my late 20s, and was ready intellectually, but I apparently no longer had a sense of humor. I simply didn't get it. I think that I was so damn serious about "getting it" that I missed the whole point. Now that I have my sense of humor again, the book is coming to life. I can't say I have breezed through the first 120 pages, but I have enjoyed them; already I am about 30 pages past my quitting point the last time.

Along with understanding that the book is funny, I am also understanding the sadness--or perhaps the loneliness--at the core of the book. Bloom's social awkwardness is touching, and the failure of others to even try to understand him is so much more striking to me now. I also had missed a key detail to Bloom that really jumps out at me now, namely, that his father committed suicide.

So, perhaps I will finish this time. So far, so good, but I don't want to jinx myself.

No surprise here, but there are some excellent Web sites for Ulysses in particular, and James Joyce in general. I found the full text here, but I have no idea if is authoritative (or legal!), or how it compares with the corrected text that was published in the 1980s. There are also, you can imagine, many pictures of Joyce, though, again, I am not sure if they are being used properly. Still, it is nice to have so many resources so readily at hand. One of my prize possessions in college was a poster of Joyce, purchased at The Harvard Coop. That same image is everywhere on the Web now.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:46 PM

March 12, 2004

The Christmas I Turned Eight

The Christmas after I turned eight, I asked my mother for exactly two presents--a dictionary and a bible. But when I awoke Christmas morning and looked under the tree, I found no such thing. Instead, I found the sorts of things normal eight-year-old boys wanted to find in those days--Matchbox cars, a baseball glove, and little plastic army men. If I was disappointed at all, I don't remember it. I only remember a nice Christmas.

The scene says a lot about my mother and me. The previous two years had been extraordinarily hard for my family. My mother had finally thrown my alcoholic and abusive father out and had gone back to work as a teacher. We were living with her father while she resumed her career and started graduate school. No sooner did some normalcy start to return, though, when my grandfather died, and my mother was left with no help, raising four young children alone, working, and facing an uncertain future.

It's crystal clear to me now what I was seeking that Christmas and how my mother undertook to help me find it. At that young age, Christmas was to me the holiday for hoping--of asking for and perhaps realizing the things you wanted the most. The dictionary and the bible were an eight-year-old Catholic boy's idealization of wisdom and comfort.

I've never asked my mother about why she ignored my request and in fact came up with a better answer. Part of it was perhaps her practicality. We already had a dictionary and a bible; why get another? But I am quite sure that the bigger part of it was that she knew exactly what I was up to. That I was asking for some understanding of why all these things had happened, and some reassurance that things were going to be all right. The simple toys she responded with were her answer: "Go back to being a child," she was saying. "Have some fun"

Now, decades later, I am in the midst of a trying time. A year ago this month a dear friend was murdered steps from my home, and over the last many months I have watched my mother and stepfather deal less and less well with my mother's advancing multiple sclerosis. But I have decided to use this time to grapple with the questions such challenges raise, and not run away from them.

Back to that Catholic boy.

When I was young and believed everything I had been taught, my religion was a great comfort to me. No matter how bad things were, no matter how much worry, I had prayer. Lying in bed at night, I would wrap prayers around long silent conversations with God, asking for his protection, detailing long lists of family, pets, and friends that I wanted secure in the eyes and arms of God. I was quite sure at those moments that everything was going to be OK. That my grandfather was safe and happy in the kingdom of heaven. That my father would stop drinking and become my father again. That my mother would arrive home safely from her late class in Boston. That the Red Sox would win the World Series.

One holds onto such ideas for only so long. And so it seemed natural to me somehow that the unquestioning faith of my childhood became a sharply cynical atheism in my late adolescence and young adulthood. Faith seemed more like a flaw than a gift, something to be suspicious of and not to find comfort in. And it was in the midst of this atheism that life dealt its next blows.

I was a senior in college, perched on the brink of the rest of my life. I was finishing a period in my life that had been wholly rewarding for me. I loved college--loved studying, loved all my activities, and was enjoying some of the first successes in a publishing career I would come to really enjoy. In November of that year, though, my father committed suicide, and, two weeks later, one of my closest childhood friends was killed skimobiling. Nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming emotion of those two events.

One of my most vivid memories is from when I returned to campus after the second funeral. Walking across the campus, I was greeted by a friend, who said something comforting. I said the only thing I could say, "I feel a million years old."

Looking back on that time, I wish that I had fallen back on the good instincts I had had when I was eight--to turn to someone and ask for comfort and wisdom. But you don't do that when your father has committed suicide. I am no expert on this, but I am sure my reaction over the next many months and years was typical of someone in my position. I simply didn't talk about it. Except for my girlfriend at the time, and later a therapist, I didn't confide in a soul. It wasn't until years later--nine to be precise--that I took some of the feelings and shared them with people in a group. And here it is 20 years later, and only now am I finally able to speak about it openly.

I am not that devout boy anymore, nor though am I that cynical young man. I am 41, myself a father of boys, 7 and 9. And while I certainly no longer believe everything I was taught, I am also no longer so smug in my non-belief. The combined forces of having children and joining this church have led me be open to almost anything. Though, perhaps typical of UUs, I have arrived at very few conclusions, even in seven years. At the bottom of it all, I waver between humanism and a kind of hopeful agnosticism.

How then, do I use my faith to help me understand what has happened most recently? What does faith offer in the face of--of all things--murder? There is nothing redeeming in what happened to Michael Harding. Not for him, for his children, for his surviving brothers and parents overseas. Not for the dozens of friends and colleagues who were left to mourn. Not for the tortured man who murdered him and eventually took his own life. It was all senseless, all loss. A veil of tears.

No one expects to find himself thrust into such a situation. But, along with the police, I was the first person with Mike's estranged wife. I was there when she told his daughter and son, ages 11 and 7. Along with another friend, I cleaned Mike's apartment before his brothers visited it, making sure that nothing too upsetting from the murder was left over. I talked to his frail, devastated parents in England. In the midst of this, I wondered at times how I would hold up. How I would deal with this tragedy, be of service to the survivors, be present for my own wife and children, and eventually get on with my life.

But, I did. I held up. Why? Because unlike the cynical me of 20 years ago, I am more like the eight year old me, and know enough to ask for help. But I am also blessed now, and I use the word purposefully, with the ability to also help others. I had two instincts in the midst of the crisis--to help where I could, and to seek help where I could. So much of the help I sought was right here--from Phyllis and from so many of you. I thank you now for it.

So my faith has taught me to seek comfort in times of struggle, even when things are beyond comprehension. I will never understand Mike's murder, or my father's suicide. They will never sit right with me. My faith doesn't offer the simple answers it once did. If I were to pray about these things, I honestly have no idea what I would attempt to say.

This September, I ran a long leg in a relay race in a hilly part of New Hampshire. I was not looking forward to it. I had run the race the year before with Mike, and returning just seemed too bittersweet. I'm not nearly in the shape I was in when Mike and I ran the marathon last October. I was too busy. At the last minute, I tried to ask out. But my friends cajoled me into doing it, and I gave in.

The morning of the race I was nervous. I was convinced I would do poorly. It was 9.5 miles of sheer hills. The race brochure warned, "There isn't a flat stretch in the course." It was one of the last legs. The weather was turning bad. I had visions of suffering a heart attack and dying. When I grabbed the baton from a teammate, the skies opened up, and I was plodding through some of the hardest rain I had ever run in. Footing was bad. We were running right along side a fast road, and there was little shoulder. "What's next?" I yelled to a fellow runner. "Famine and plague?"

About a mile into it, I found myself relaxed, comfortable, striding well. My teammates were stationed every couple of miles with water and Gatorade. "Looking great!" I heard them say, and their faces told me that they actually believed it. I was eating up the hills. I would get to the top of a long grueling stretch and let out a loud whoop, expelling air in a kind of he-man Lamaze method. I don't know what came over me.

Coming down a long, tree-lined downhill, relaxed, almost gliding, I had a sudden and vivid sense of my friend Mike. I ran this road with him the year before. I have a great picture of the group of us, tired and happy after a race well done. I could picture his smile, his dark good looks. My heart surged. A warmth spread over my shoulders and arms. I picked up my pace some more and charged on through the last several miles. My friends and I agreed afterward: It may have been the best I have ever run.

Who knows what the vision of Mike was. A supernatural moment? A few well-placed endorphins? I don't really know, and I don't really care. I'm not inclined to worry too much about exactly what it was, because it was wonderful. I kept the good feeling well into that evening and the next day. Sitting in a New Hampshire restaurant that night with my family, I was a tired and happy man.

The challenges of the last year have crystallized for me what is important, and real, and worthy of my time and attention and devotion. It is in marital love. It is in my imperfect and single-minded devotion to my sons. It is in those precious moments of life when I find myself open to things. It's holding my wife's face in my hands. It's playing on the grass or on a beach with my sons and pausing, breathless, our faces to the sky. It is those calm and lucid moments when my mother and I speak and she recalls things in the thoughtful and wry way I admire so much. It is honoring what was good about my father but taking care not to repeat what was bad. It is that sensation of running with my friend again.

It is realizing what is worthwhile and good in my life, and holding onto it dearly.

So may it be.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:12 PM

March 9, 2004

Outsell Finds Market for Paid Content to be Larger than Thought

Outsell does excellent research about the publishing and information industries. They have some new research that suggests the market for paid content is much larger than previously thought. To quote briefly from their press release:

"Outsell, Inc. ... today released startling new analysis revealing the online paid content market to be 35 times larger than commonly reported. A new Outsell Briefing, Content Vendor Best Practices: Busting Up Fee Vs. Free, provides specific and actionable information for content vendors and information users alike. The Briefing includes profiles of more than 100 successful content providers focused on blended business models that create value for their users. Rather than worrying about fee OR free, innovative companies are taking a wide-open, both/and approach, creating a very large and often misrepresented market and ending the fee vs. free debate. "

I am not at all surprised by this. Indeed, I think the market for paid Internet content is undercounted—as is the market for paid internet advertising. There is a lot of good news out there for publishers.

However, the ability to capitalize on these opportunities depends on publishers being able to deploy multichannel publishing technology at a reasonable and predictable cost.

For publishers, the Internet can seem like a conundrum. In the midst of so much plenty, why is there so little real revenue? Indeed, the opportunity defines the challenge--so many potential opportunities, and yet so many of them are unproven.

Publishers are used to a model where they can focus on predicting audience and revenue against a relatively well-known set of costs. The Web, for all its potential, is still unformed, and few business models have any kind of track record.

Complicating matters is the difficult question of predicting costs. Many Web development efforts have not just proven costly--they have often suffered from cost overruns, unmet expectations, and enormous hidden costs. Add to this the constant change in technical requirements and infrastructure, and publishers are left with often staggering challenges.

Building a Web infrastructure is a complex, highly technical undertaking that many organizations are unprepared to face. Research from CAP Ventures and elsewhere suggests that as many as 60% of in-house Web development and integration efforts fail, and are abandoned at significant cost over time.

Publishers who consider building their own systems face high costs of software and integration, and the need to maintain and upgrade the system over time. Publishers are not typically staffed for this kind of operation, and even may not have necessary skills and experience to contract for this work efficiently.

Any single component application of a Web site is itself complex and difficult to select, install, and customize. Yet integration of multiple component applications is even harder. Even a component technology such as a search engine, long considered "commodity" software, is difficult to integrate across a complex Web site to the point where the end user is ensured a consistent experience across the site.

Publishers who seek partners are often faced with "all or nothing" proposals that bind them to larger portals that could well cannibalize or overtake their own business.

Further complicating things is the perceived need to move quickly, even in the face of partial information.

Even in cases where the initial Web development effort has been completed somewhat successfully, the publisher is likely left with a maintenance headache. Systems and subsystems change so quickly, by the time the project is completed, major components of the system will likely needed to be upgraded or swapped out.

So What to Do?

The key is to effectively manage all aspects of the technology that supports your publishing. This begins with basic questions such as, "Should we even try to do this ourselves, or should we look at options for partnering, outsourcing, or relying on an Application Service Provider (ASP)?" If you are not the kind of organization that is accustomed to running a lot of technology, you should think twice before trying to run a complex publishing operation on your own.

Just my thoughts, as usual. I would love to hear from others on this topic.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:01 PM

A Life, in a Few Lines

My mom's obituary ran in today's Boston Globe. Norma A. Murphy of Winthrop died on March 6. She is survived by her husband (my stepfather), my brothers and sister, eight grandchildren, and nearly a score of nieces and nephews. The short, precise, paid listing is one of dozens running today. The longer written obituaries are devoted to the famous and near-famous--a college basketball coach, a minor titan of industry, a community activist.

I was tempted, at first, to call the Globe and make the case for a written obituary for my mother. She was an accomplished person--a college graduate who had later received her Master's degree, a career elementary school teacher, a town meeting member, and a near-lifelong resident of a town that she knew the best of and the worst of--and loved anyway.

Yet, as someone who has worked for newspapers and magazines, I knew that the brief death notice tells everything that is "newsworthy" about my mom. Fourth grade teachers almost never become famous. Indeed, my mother was one of those people who hated any kind of public attention. She was even uncomfortable with the small gestures of gratitude and affection an elementary school teacher would receive--a gift from a student, or a thank-you note from parents at an assembly.

The meaningful details of my mother's life will not end up in the Boston Globe. Instead, they will be in the hearts and minds of the people whose lives she touched, and will continue to touch for many years to come. Consider a neighbor of mine who happened to grow up with me in Winthrop and had my mother as a teacher. A chance encounter here in Melrose had us catching up years later, and in the course of the conversation he told me he was retiring from his current job, returning to school, and becoming a teacher.

"And you know, Billy," he said, reverting to the name only my mother still called me, "It's because of your mother."

That he said this was heart-warming enough. What was even better was that he was a wonderful guy--smart and big-hearted, a great student and athlete in high school and certain to be a great teacher and coach in this new phase of his life.

I had a similar conversation that same year at a high school reunion. A classmate of mine had gone into teaching, and had done her student teaching under my mother's supervision. She couldn't say enough about my mother as a mentor, and how she had valued that formative time in her career.

These encounters were a new lens into my mom's life, and a welcome one. They came at a time when multiple sclerosis was overtaking her, forcing her to retire from teaching, and--over time--to give up many of the things she enjoyed so much. Fortunately for my mom, she had her health long enough to enjoy time with her second husband. Together, they traveled to Canada and Ireland, visited the grandkids in Florida, and did many of the things older couples do. If it weren't for my mother's illness, they would have had long and happy golden years.

I can't possibly speak for my mother and speculate about her feelings about her illness. She no doubt had her regrets and her frustrations, but she rarely voiced them. Especially early on, she found ways to adapt and accept. When she lost some of her hearing, she learned to read lips. When her balance suffered, she knew to take the arm of the person walking with her.

For my part, my deepest regret was that the worst years of her illness began when my sons were babies. They never got to know her as fully as I would have liked. They have seen pictures of her holding them as babies, and they have heard all my stories about what kind of mom she was--how she never missed a thing, and how her network of friends and neighbors was so complete she would know what I had done wrong even before I got home and could act guilty.

And they know her sense of humor, even if they didn't hear it nearly often enough directly from her. I inherited a few things from my mother--her love of reading and storytelling, her penchant to worry too much, and her quirky sense of humor. (Hey, someone has to keep puns alive!) I often remind them when they are rolling their eyes at my jokes they also have their Nana to blame. They know too how much my mom valued education, and I hope they feel her pride too when they bring a good report card home and show it to me.

I am mindful that when my family gathers this week to say goodbye there won't be a teacher among us. We all chose different paths--lawyer, engineer, nurse, writer. I discovered in graduate school that I didn't have the stamina for teaching. I also discovered that I didn't have the nerve to take on the stakes involved--the success or failure of so many young minds. It takes someone like the two schoolmates who were so influenced by my mother. People with big hearts and the energy and the commitment to look out at that sea of faces every day and see a world of hope and potential. It takes someone like my mom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:44 AM | Comments (1)

March 7, 2004

About This Blog and the Author

This blog combines two blogs, A Thousand Furnished Rooms, which has been active since March 2004, and a second blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, which I wrote from August 2003 to January 2005.

A Thousand Furnished Rooms was a personal blog with a specific focus. Over the last several years, I have been developing narrative nonfiction. I hesitate to call it "memoir," because, well, that seems too precious to me. "Narrative nonfiction" seems both more accurate and less precious, yet also somehow less limiting to me.

My professional blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, focused on the subject matter of my business, New Millennium Publishing. New Millennium is a consulting practice focused on emerging technical issues for publishers -- including content management, XML, and digital rights management.

Like its two predecessor blogs, this will be a work in progress. I will post a mix of new materials, recent materials, and past materials that I am revisiting.

I realize that in combining the two blogs, I run the risk of alienating readers who come here expecting one or the other blog. Some of you may only be interested in the entries related to technology and publishing, and some of you may only want to read the more personal entries. To that end, my developer, Aaron Schutzengel, added a "switch" that allows you to choose "personal posts only," "tech posts only," or "everything (default)." It seems to work really well, so if you feel strongly about such things, by all means, avail yourself of it.

About the Name of the Earlier Blog
The earlier blog's name, A Thousand Furnished Rooms, comes from a favorite poem, "Preludes," by T. S. Eliot. (For an accurate copy of the poem online, please see the copy on Bartelby.com). The specific image is:

One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

The poem is jammed with such wonderful urban imagery ("a lonely cab-horse steams and stamps"), and I love both the image and the sentiment. I still love the poem even though it was swallowed whole by "Cats."

About the Author
My day job is running a small, specialized consulting practice called New Millennium Publishing. In that role, I work with publishers implementing content management and other kinds of electronic publishing technology. I also write quite a bit on these topics for publications such as The Gilbane Report and The Seybold Report, and have co-authored two books.

Prior to running New Millennium Publishing, I held a variety of writing and technical positions, and have been an adjunct writing instructor at a number of Boston area colleges. I have a B.A. and M.A. in writing.

I live in greater Boston with my wife and two sons, and I live and die with the Red Sox.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM | Comments (1)

March 4, 2004

Adobe FrameMaker 7.1

I had an excellent briefing from the project management folks at Adobe about the 7.1 release of FrameMaker. I won't try to discuss the entire new set of features, which is summarized here and in a more comprehensive PDF download here.

The features that caught my eye, included the following:


Karl Matthews, the group product manager for FrameMaker made an excellent point about SVG, and its applicability for localization. Too many images reside in what Matthews called "opaque binary file formats," where it is very difficult or impossible to get at and manipulate elements of an image. SVG, because it is hierarchical and an XML language, allows programmers to easily parse, navigate, and manipulate the image "tree" and all its elements. Thus, an SVG-encoded image could straightforwardly be manipulated to allow certain elements (captions, callouts, text) to be localized for different venues. So, along with the more obvious reasons to consider SVG for technical publishing (it's a vector format, it's scalable, it's cross-platform), organizations should now add localization to this list.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:34 AM

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